Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives

Evangelization

Our Duty to Proclaim Christ

The Need for Spiritual Martyrdom in Living the Catholic Faith

If there is one theme that Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, keeps stressing
to the faithful it is the imperative, Proclaim Christ! We do well to examine
what this means.

To proclaim Christ means to make Christ known by those who do not yet know
Him, and better known by those who do not know Him well. This is absolutely
necessary if Christ is to be loved and served as He deserves, for we do not
love what we do not know, and we do not give ourselves in devoted service except
to someone we love. Knowledge must come first, then love, and then service.

But proclaiming Christ is a very special way of making Christ known. It means
telling others about Christ in such a way as to convince them that Jesus is
their only hope of happiness in this life and in the life to come. Proclaiming
Christ means that we ourselves have a deep relationship with Christ, that He
is the most important person in our lives, that we personally love Christ, and
that we want nothing more than to convince others that there is no treasure
more precious and no joy more satisfying than the surpassing knowledge of Christ
Jesus.

We must be sure, however, that the Christ we proclaim is the real Christ, and
not the product of someones fervent imagination. There are many zealots nowadays
telling us, Here is Christ or There is Christ, but the one they are proclaiming
is not the Son of God, who became the Son of Mary. The real Christ is now physically
on earth in the Blessed Sacrament and is speaking on earth in the person of
His Vicar the Bishop of Rome.

Why Proclaim Christ?

Remember, we receive nothing from God to keep to ourselves alone. We are obliged
to share as a condition of our salvation, as the Savior made plain in His prophecy
about the last day. To whom more has been given, he is expected to give more
to others. Therefore, we might say that Christ should be proclaimed because
He wants to be known by those whom He came into the world to save. Knowing
Him, people will respond to His goodness by obeying His commandments and striving
to imitate the life that He lived.

When the Savior told the apostles before His Ascension to make disciples of
all nations, He was speaking through them to us. This is the first and basic
reason why Christ should be proclaimed: because He wants human beings like Thomas
to adore Him as their Lord and their God, and like the repentant Peter to tell
Him, Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you.

But there is another and more immediately urgent reason why we should proclaim
Christ. Perhaps never before in history has mankind been more desperately in
need of a Savior. The scientific explosion of modern times has opened up vistas
of secular knowledge that were not even dreamed to exist as recently as the
past century. We have penetrated into the secret of the atom and man has set
foot on the moon. We travel across space faster than the velocity of sound,
and we can communicate ideas across the world with the velocity of light.

Yet all these advancements in tapping the secrets of matter have not been balanced
with a corresponding development in man's spirit. The modern world, certainly
our Western American world, is spiritually ill. This illness is deep, deep
down in the human heart, and no one but the living Christ can heal it. In order
to heal the illness of our society, Christ must be known as the Divine Physician
- if he is to work the miracles of restoring ailing souls to health, and even
of raising dead souls back to supernatural life.

To Whom Do We Proclaim?

But to whom should we proclaim Christ? The answer to this question is not
as obvious as it may seem. There are, in fact, as many answers as there are
Christians. Absolutely speaking, we should proclaim Christ to everyone, since
the Lord's mandate is clear enough. We are to make known the Good News to all
creatures.

But the very universality of our mission as believers may obscure our personal
responsibility. It is right here, I believe, that something has been drastically
missing in the Church's apostolate. For how is it that after almost 2000 years
since the Incarnation much less than half the human race is even nominally Christian,
and among Christians only about half qualify as professed Catholics?

One would think that after all these years since Christ died and rose from
the dead at least more, if not most, of mankind would be Christian and indeed
Catholic. It stands to reason, one might say. After all, is not the Person
of Jesus the most appealing, even on human grounds, in the annals of history?
Is not the message of Jesus sublime in the highest degree? Is not the Christian
ethic elevating of personal and social morality, as in raising women to a dignity
that is unknown outside the true Faith? Has not Christ promised to give the
help of His grace to those who proclaim His name, and even to work miracles
in witness to the truth of His claims?

We answer yes to all of these questions, and then sadly turn to the
facts. Not only is only about one-third of the human family Christian, but
the ratio of growth among non-Christians is greater by far than in Christian
cultures, now plagued by contraception, divorce, and legalized murder of the
unborn.

What is the explanation? There are no simple answers, and the final estimate
must be left to the mysterious judgment of God. Nevertheless, one explanation
is the fact that proclaiming Christ is costly, and too many Christians have
been unwilling to pay the price.

They will give lip service to what they sincerely believe. (And Faith comes
from hearing. None of us would be a believer today unless some believer in
Christ had first told us about Him. If Faith comes from hearing, someone who
believes must do the speaking. This much is too evident to be questioned.)
But when it comes to carrying this into practice, then suddenly something happens.
We freeze in our tracks, and our zeal becomes strangely cold.

Yet we reread the Gospels and what do we find? We find that Christ Himself
was not successful in proclaiming Himself to the world. He experienced opposition
and persecution and finally was crucified for daring to intrude on the smug
complacency of the people of His day. And He made it clear that those who were
to follow Him and try to communicate His message of salvation would face the
same thing.

Thus we return to our question, To whom should we proclaim Christ? Our reply:
We should proclaim Christ to everyone who enters our lives from this day to
our dying day. Everyone.

The object of our zeal has to be practical and prudent; it should be loving
and generous. But it must be universal; it must be a conscious effort to radiate
Christ and reveal Him, make Him known or better known by every single person
whose life we touch in any way: from a three minute telephone call to a friend,
to a 300 page book some scholars might publish in the years to come. To whom
should we proclaim Christ? To every man, woman and child that God puts into
our lives, if only for a moment or, as in marriage, for a lifetime.

We have no illusions about what this will cost us. But neither do we doubt
that this is our God-given responsibility. And this brings us to one last question,
in a way the most important one: How should we proclaim Christ?

How to Proclaim Christ

There is deep mystery implied in proclaiming Christ. In God's ordinary Providence
He uses external means to confer internal grace. So true is this that ordinarily
He requires some kind of sense perceptible communication by means of eye or
ear in order to give actual grace to the mind and heart.

Christ spoke. He spoke often; He spoke in detail; He spoke in sermons and
parables and allegories; He spoke to individuals and He spoke to crowds. He
spoke, it seems, at such great length that more than once He became exhausted
from this verbal communication. Moreover, Christ performed actions, especially
the acts of virtue that everyone could see. He practiced patience with the
apostles; He practiced charity towards those in need; He practiced mercy towards
sinners; and He practiced perfect obedience to the will of His Father.

The point is that we should proclaim Christ as Christ proclaimed Himself, by
word of mouth and by word of life: by talking about Christ and telling others
what Christ wants people to do; and by living Christ and thus proclaiming Him
by the Christian virtues that we perform.

Among the letters that St. Francis Xavier sent to St. Ignatius of Loyola from
India is one that he wrote in 1542, about the lack of missionaries to preach
the Gospel to the pagans: Many, many people hereabouts, he lamented, are
not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians.
Again and again I have thought of going around to the universities of Europe,
especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention
of those with more learning than charity, What a tragedy; how many souls are
being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!

Xavier was no exception. The saints had a clear and unsentimental belief in
the existence of heaven and hell. They believed that Christ came into the world
to save the world for heaven and from hell. And they spent themselves proclaiming
Christ because they realized that only by the grace of Christ can we reach heaven
and avoid hell.

We asked the question of how to proclaim Christ. We should proclaim Christ
as men and women who know Christ from the official teaching of the Church and
from the personal experience that comes from prayer. How should we proclaim
Christ? We should proclaim Christ as persons who are deeply in love with Christ,
which means we are willing to do anything, no matter how hard, if it is pleasing
to Christ. For the difficulty in proclaiming Christ is not that the Gospel
He preached is hard to understand. The difficulty is rather in the demands
that His teaching makes on the human will.

As time goes by, we will more than once be tempted to keep silent out of fear
of rejection or of being ignored, or even strongly opposed. We will be afraid
of losing a friend or making an enemy. We will be urged to compromise on the
Faith we have heard and on the virtue that, as Catholics, we know we should
live.

But let us remember this. Just before Christ left this world in visible form,
He told the disciples, and through them is telling us, You are to be my witnesses
in Samaria, Judea and even to the ends of the earth. The Biblical word for
witnesses is martyroi.

What are we being told? We are being told to be martyrs of Christ. That is
what proclaiming Christ really means. It means being willing to shed our blood,
in body if need be, but in spirit certainly. It means being ready to suffer
for the love of Christ who died on the cross for love of us. But we need have
no fear. There is greater joy in suffering for Christ than in any pleasure
that the world can provide.

Rev. John A. Hardon, S.J. is Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Institute
for Advanced Studies in Catholic Doctrine at St. John's University and author
of The Catholic Catechism and The Catholic Dictionary. The text
of this article is adapted from his commencement address at Christendom College
on May 10, 1981.